Friday, February 22, 2008

If you should stumble across this blog, I bet you have encountered the same problem I did. After you installed the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 you cannot find the SQL Server Management Studio in your Start menu, and if you try to search for the SqlWb.exe it's nowhere to be found. In my situation I had installed Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 prior to the SQL installation.

The problem is that the installation of the SQL server will interpret the installation of the SQL Express Edition as a newer version or an already installed client tool.

So the solution for you may be to uninstall the SQL Express. I had a Windows 2003 64x Server so I had to uninstall (via the Add or Remove programs) the "Microsoft SQL Server 2005" (which was the Express instance, installed by Visual Studio 2005/2008). I then reran the SQL Server 2005 installation and ensured that the Client tools were selected (click the advanced button in the installation wizard).

After this I had the Management Tools back on the machine, but now I couldn't open the Express database in my VS 2005 project so I had to install the SQL Express again by rerunning(updating) the Visual Studio 2008.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I ran into the same issue and managed to solve the problem without uninstalling the SqlServer Express database engine.

I first uninstalled SqlServer Management Studio Express. I then selected the Remove option for SqlServer 2005 in the control panel. On the next screen, I unchecked SQLExpress and checked Management Tools.

After that, I was able to reinstall the Management Tools from using the SqlRun_Tools.msi from Standard Edition.